Photo by Dominik Huber

Open since 1991, the East Village Bed & Coffee is now one of the area’s old-timers, but it’s still easy to walk past this guesthouse without even knowing what it is. There’s no sign—just two doors on the street, one painted bright red with the street number,the other one covered with stickers and graffiti but no handle.

The Mexican Room

Its 12 rooms, all of varying sizes but none of them enormous, are divided equally among three floors, with the top two reached by staircases narrow enough to be worthy of Amsterdam. The rooms, which have either queen or double beds, each have their own theme—for instance, the Mexico Room has Latin American knick-knacks on the wall, and that includes a sombrero that a guest mysteriously left there one day. Rooms all have their own air-conditioning—a must for late spring and summer in New York. All the bathrooms are shared—there’s one on every floor.

Obviously, it’s not the sort of place where you’ll get a mint on your pillow. What you will get are lots and lots of thoughtful touches to help you see as much of the city as possible. Every floor’s largish common area has a computer available for guest use, as well as free Wi-Fi and a dedicated phone line for receiving phone calls. Large subway maps are mounted on the walls to help with planning, and a long photocopied list of personally recommended restaurants is available for the taking.

Free-trade coffee and tea are available in the kitchens on every floor, as are filtered water and a refrigerator with food staples, for those who want to do a little cooking. There’s also a small backyard with a koi pond—this acts as the de facto smoking lounge when the weather’s good.

Rooms (double occupancy, with all taxes included) start at just $115 for the smallish “Dutch room” on up to $140 for larger front rooms that look out onto Avenue C.  With prices like that, it’s not unusual for many rooms to fill up as long as eight months in advance. (There’s a waiting list available on the website for cancellations.) All in all, this low-key guesthouse is a great place for feeling a little more like a temporary neighbor and less like someone just passing through town.

East Village Bed & Coffee; 110 Avenue C, New York

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Lots of visitors to New York would love to stay close to the clubs and restaurants of the Lower East Side and other nearby neighborhoods, but until fairly recently there were just not many rooms available here, outside of a few scattered guesthouses and very small hotels.

It wasn’t until 2004, when The Hotel on Rivington went up, that a more luxurious option became available. At the time, THOR got a huge amount of press for its looks—this light-blue glass tower made no attempt to blend in with the five-story tenements and other 19th-century buildings that were its neighbors. (Since then, it doesn’t stick out quite as much as it once did. A handful of other glassy buildings have arisen nearby, and more are on their way.)

Don’t come here if your idea of luxury requires a lobby the size of the one in Grand Hotel—THOR makes its priorities clear by using its ground floor for a lounge and restaurant. To get to the actual lobby, you have to go up a story, to what Europeans call the 1st floor but what we Americans insist on calling the 2nd floor.

Whatever floor you claim it’s on, the tiny lobby is little more than a way station toward yet another lounge, this time one with an impressive pool table and floor-to-ceiling windows that look out onto Rivington and one of my favorite places for empty calories, Economy Candy. (A visit here is never wasted.).

Those floor-to-ceiling windows turn up again—they’re in every room, even in the bathrooms. It’s almost as if the city itself serves as the rooms’ “art.” Again, THOR is not a place for people whose idea of luxury is a lot of frills. The flatscreen TVs and closets, for instance, are built into the walls, and what little furniture there is (a coffee table, armchairs covered in dark velour) has only a smidge of color and pattern.

None of this high design and understated luxury comes cheap. It never does. THOR’s rooms start at around $500 for double occupancy in high season, but you may be able to swing a slight deal during the heat of summer.

Hotel on Rivington; 107 Rivington Street; New York

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